Here's another street scene. This time we are watching the main intersection in Julian, California. I set the camera at the base of the flag pole at the Julian Town Hall and had it snap pictures every other second. The action is somewhat jerky. I should have had it take pictures every second. They're played at a rate of 15 frames per second.
It's kind of dull. People come and go. Nothing ever happens.
Well, you do get to see my shadow and the camera's shadow. And if you don't blink you get to see a horse pulling a carriage full of tourists and a little pony pulling a cute little carriage.
In case you blinked, here are some horsey pictures.
There were interesting people to watch, too. One woman thought that her pleather leggings were so stylish that they needed to be shown off in a rustic little town.
So much to do in Julian! Horse-drawn carriage rides! Shopping! Pleather! Pie! Update: Shoe wonders if the man in the blue shirt ever found who he's looking for. At :46 we see this (just in the shadow at the right)!
He and his wife(?) head off together toward the Julian Drug Store. Happy ending!
We have crystal tchotchkes in the living room window. When the sun hits them we have rainbows on the ceiling. This little video shows seven and a half hours of rainbows and reflections wandering around the living room.
I used my fisheye lens to capture as much of the room as I can. I should have aimed the camera lower so it would have included more of the floor in the foreground. There were rainbows and moving shadows down there that we don't get to see and there weren't a lot of rainbows on the ceiling that would have been lost.
I had the camera take a shot every 60 seconds. They're played back at 15 frames per second. An hour goes by every four seconds. The camera's sensitivity was ISO 200 and the shots were 1/50th second at f/11.
We have a clock on the right hand wall where you can watch the time fly by.
Here's a rather uninteresting one. My computer desk was a disaster. You must remember when we put it together in the first place.
Here you get to see me clear it, clean it, raise it a bit (my knees would slam into the frame) and put the stuff that belongs on it back. All in an hour. Sped up to all in a minute and 12 seconds.
What you're not getting to see is my dealing with the crap that didn't come back. It's still in a pile on the other side of the sofa. I'll get to that after I hit the "Publish Post" button. I hope.
I had the camera take pictures every four seconds and I play them back at 12 frames per second. We see a minute pass in just over one second.
Well, we have the technology...here's a picture of the crap that didn't go back. It's a lot of crap. (Not all in the picture is crap from the desk. The quilt on the sofa's arm wasn't on the computer desk and isn't crap. It's a priceless treasure!)
The west coast was treated to an eclipse of the moon this morning. When I went to bed last night there were a lot of clouds in the sky. I was afraid that the clouds would get denser and completely cover up the show. But I woke up at 4:00 and looked outside and there were a few clouds and the moon was casting nice shadows.
The show was on!
Being lazy, I just set the camera up to make a little movie of the eclipse in the back yard. We don't have a good view of the horizon so the moon was going to go behind trees before the moon was fully eclipsed, but that's OK. I didn't know what I'd end up with anyway. I needed to set the camera to take in a fairly wide view so the moon's image was going to be rather small. I was just hoping that this would record the dimming of the moon and the darkening of the sky.
And, with any luck, the dancing of the clouds.
There were clouds in the sky when I set things up but they mostly disappeared before the eclipse started. I was hoping the clouds would stay (but thin enough to always see the moon) so there would be more movement in the video.
I took some test shots and settled on five-second exposures at f/4.8 with the ISO set at 200. The focal length of the lens was 32mm. I took the pictures from 4:08 until 6:51. The frames are played at a rate of 24fps.
The moon is between the horns of Taurus. You can see the Hayades below the moon at the beginning. The sky gets a bit blacker as the eclipse progresses. Just before the moon goes behind the trees you can finally see that part of the moon is getting dimmed. Then it's dawn.
I'm pretty pleased with this one. I recommend watching it in HD and in full screen.
Here's an image from the movie just before the moon goes behind the trees.
I need better clouds. We just don't have dramatic clouds in these parts right now.
I need a better tripod. Some of the bits of this video were taken in stiff breezes and the camera shakes a lot.
I need to use my circular polarizing filter more (when appropriate) to darken the sky and bring out the clouds.
I need plinky music to set the mood. (Not wanting the wrath of YouTube, I used some of their music...I don't know how well the piece I chose worked out.)
I need better cropping, editing, post-production, ...
This video has bits I shot:
At work the day after we had some really, really dramatic clouds from a monsoonal system
Yesterday we went back to the spot on the Oceanside Pier where I had made some time-lapse videos. It was a hot day so I thought that there would be a lot of people there. By lunchtime there seemed to be room down on the beach for a lot more beach blankets. If you want a spot on the water on a hot day, Oceanside seems to be the place to go. It's easy to get to. We took the Sprinter from Escondido. The pier is just a short walk from the transit center.
I made a couple of videos.
The first isn't terribly successful. The tide was pretty high so there wasn't any beach under the pier. So there aren't many people in front of the camera. And the people setting up their blankets on the beach are pretty far away so they're just dots. And not very dense dots. I really had expected the beach to be wall-to-wall people. Maybe they showed up after lunch.
Here are about two hours and 15 minutes. The shots were taken at 10-second intervals and are played back at a rate of 30 frames per second. I shouldn't have used my fisheye lens. It probably would have been a lot more interesting to aim just at the part of the beach where the sunbathers set up. Maybe next time.
A more interesting video was taken from a spot a little way up the ramp that goes from the street down to the pier. I used my telephoto zoom lens set at the 70mm focal length and pointed it down the length of the pier. We get to see the people going up and down the pier and a lot of traffic out on the water. This video is much more successful.
It was shot at 2-second intervals and played back at 15 frames per second. I let the camera click away for only 18 minutes. I figured that if anybody wants to see more action all they have to do is play it again. Nothing really changes. Occasionally people stop and look over the rail for a while. There are two people near the start of the pier who are there for the whole time and the humanity swirls around them. That's kind of fun.
I formed the putty into a cube and put it in the freezer. I thought it might make for an interesting effect with the action starting out slow (because the putty was really stiff) then speeding up as it warmed. I didn't notice anything like that happening. The strong magnet quickly got swallowed by the putty and the marbles took their time. The condensation forming then evaporating was the only interesting effect of the freezing.
I changed the interval between shots as time went by. It started with four-second intervals. Before we went out for dinner and "Sleeping Beauty Wakes" at the La Jolla Playhouse I had worked the interval up to four minutes between shots. When we got home from the show I increased the interval to eight minutes.
The shots were played back at 30 frames per second but the action got slow fast. So I broke it up into pieces and play the segments back at increasingly higher rates. The nearly 22 hours (from 9:22am until 7:07 the next morning) take only 18 seconds. Wow. (Or, as some might say, "MOM.")
I might be finished with my magnetic silly putty movies unless somebody gives me ideas for more.
This time the Buckyballs are on the bottom and the putty envelops it from above. Who will win?
I started with the intervalometer set to take pictures at three-second intervals. As time went by and the action slowed down I gradually increased the interval to six, nine, twelve, 18, ..., 88 seconds. The intervalometer's preset intervals go up to 89 seconds.
When I made my first cactus movie, I used a custom interval of two minutes. My second cactus movie was taken at four minute intervals. I still had those intervals programmed so I finished the movie with those intervals. The last eight or nine hours were taken at four minute intervals.
I'm effectively playing the images at a rate of 60 frames per second. You get to see the 16 hours of action compressed to a mere 28 seconds (plus a four-second long title).
As the putty was approaching the plastic sheet the things were on I saw that the putty would start to head out of the frame. So I moved the sheet away from the camera a little bit between frames for a bunch of frames. Then when it was about to cover the Buckyballs on the camera side I thought it would be fun to see how it might cover the balls on the side. So I rotated the sheet a bit frame by frame.
Unfortunately, by the time I got it all moved and rotated it had moved an inch or two away from the camera. The aperture was open pretty wide so the depth of field was pretty narrow. The balls went out of focus. Poop!
Here's another movie featuring Crazy Aaron's Strange Attractor Thinking Putty.
This time it features another toy that Peggy introduced me to: Buckyballs.
The silly putty's devouring the little magnets starts out pretty fast then got excruciatingly slow. So I took chunks of the movie and doubled, quadrupled and even octupled the rate the frames are played back. I don't have the technology (at least not that I care to employ) to have the speed increase gradually. So the action will suddenly, and very noticeably, change. That kind of lets us see better how the action progresses.
Digging the Buckyballs out of the Thinking Putty and getting all the putty off the little balls is not fun. But I have a few more ideas of how to combine the two into little movies. If anybody has more ideas, I'd like to hear them.
There's not a lot more to say about this. The intervals between the shots doesn't really matter since I changed the rate of playback a lot. So, just sit back and enjoy the show. (I hope you enjoy the show!)
We went to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park (formerly the Wild Animal Park) on Saturday to make a time-lapse movie. The subject of the intended movie wasn't moving that day so we took the Africa Tram Safari instead. I've been wanting to make a movie from such a ride so that's what I did. I had been afraid that the constant clicking of the camera would become annoying to the nearby passengers but nobody seemed to notice. Or at least they didn't care.
It took me a bit longer to set up than I had hoped and we were among the last to get aboard. The tram started rolling just before I got the camera clicking.
I had the camera take a picture every two seconds. I used my fisheye lens to get as much of the scenery as possible. Because it's using the fisheye lens the scenery in the movie is much closer than it appears.
I play the movie at a rate of 15 frames per second. The 31 minute ride lasts just over a minute.
This isn't a very interesting movie. There's just not much to see.
On Friday, August 5, my iPad's 3D Sun app sent an alert that told me that there had been an M9-class solar flare that sent a major Coronal Mass Ejection straight to earth. It told me that auroras were possible at all latitudes and that we should be on the lookout for them after dark.
This was an event not to be missed.
I packed up my camera, intervalometer, portable reclining chair and a not-quite-warm-enough jacket and went to our usual sky watching spot east of Julian.
If there were going to be auroras, they'd be a great time-lapse movie subject. If there weren't any the night was clear and the stars moving across the sky (along with the planes up there and the cars down on the highways) would make for a nice movie.
We saw a handful of satellites, a few meteors and a bunch of aircraft. But, alas, no auroras. The sky was pretty.
The moon was almost at first quarter so it was above the horizon till after 11:00. It was somewhat chilly, around 65º and there was a stiff wind blowing. We finally abandoned the chairs and escaped to the car. We watched the sky through open, leeward windows.
I set the camera to take pictures at its highest sensitivity (ISO 3200) with the lens at its widest aperture (f/2.8). I used my fisheye lens so the view is heavily distorted. I had the camera take 20 second exposures every 21 seconds. The movie goes from 8:43pm until 11:15 when we got tired of craning our necks to watch the sky through car windows.
We get to see the the sky and terrain darken as the twilight fades and the moon sets. The shadow of the moon scooting across the valley floor is fun. It didn't quite make it to the horizon. We're wusses and couldn't stay out any longer. It's 40 miles home through winding mountain roads. Not a good time to drive while sleepy.
The 437 frames are played at a rate of 12 frames per second. The two and a half hours take only 36 seconds. As usual, it's in HD. Select the highest resolution your connection will support and watch in full screen mode.
Here is a picture with one of the satellites (I think). It's at the top of the picture.
Oooh! Here's a better satellite. It flared a couple of times.
It disappeared then made another little flare three frames (a minute) later.
A month ago I showed a video of two cactus blossoms opening on a fallen cactus on consecutive nights. It shows a blossom opening one night then that blossom collapsing while the second one opens the following evening. I went to work and didn't want to leave the camera unattended so there's a gap in the action.
I ended the post saying that I'd like to capture the opening and closing of a blossom in a single take and that I'd take a day of vacation if I had to.
I took a day of vacation yesterday.
Another blossom opened on that cactus Sunday evening. I set up the camera and LED desk lamp next to the cactus and set the intervalometer to take a picture every four minutes. I let the camera snap away from 4:05pm Sunday until 11:05pm Monday. Thirty-one hours.
The four-minute intervals result in 15 pictures being taken each hour. My video plays them at a rate of 15 frames per second. We see the 31 hours go by in just 31 seconds.
The daytime sections are lit by the sun and the nighttime sections are lit by the desk lamp. The shadows at night are sharp and don't move. The camera's nighttime exposures got set for the general brownness of the background. The white of the cactus became very overexposed much of the time as a result. The camera did the best it could.
(HD, as usual, is available...see the bottom right corner of your player.)
This answers the question you've all been asking: "What does Chuckbert do in bed?"
Sometimes I sleep.
We see me in bed lit only by the hall light and the TIX Clock on the nightstand. I have terrible eyesight so I can't see a normal clock without moving my face right up to the clock. The TIX clock has big dots that I can see from my pillow. There are a couple of LEDs in the hours section that are very dim. When they happen to be the lights that are lit the light level goes down quite a bit. I think that is why this video flickers so much.
I set the camera to its highest sensitivity and put the camera into aperture priority mode at its widest F-stop. In this mode the camera sets the shutter speed to get the proper exposure. During the night the exposures were two to two and a half seconds long. Near the end when dawn is breaking the exposures are only ⅛ second long. Cameras are so smart!
The shots were taken every 20 seconds. They're played back at a rate of 30 frames per second. That shows us 10 minutes each second. An hour every six seconds. Whew! I need to rest!
There isn't a lot of activity here. I'm apparently not a restless sleeper.
I love peanut butter. From the beginning of my time in junior high school until I graduated from high school six years later I brown bagged it nearly every day. And almost every day I took a peanut butter sandwich. I still take peanut butter and a bagel for lunch these days.
A few years ago I showed how I make peanut butter with our Blendtec Blender on What's Up, Chuck?. I showed pictures of the peanuts in their shells, the shelled peanuts and a YouTube video of the peanuts being ground in the blender.
I made a batch of peanut butter tonight. I made about half as much as I showed in my earlier movie. But this time I made a time-lapse movie of the whole process. I shell the peanuts, grind them and scrape the peanut butter out of the blender into a jar. All in 33 seconds.
I shot the shelling segment one frame every three seconds. When I finished shelling the peanuts I changed the interval to one shot each second. The movie is played back at 30 frames per second.
I put two blobs of Thinking Putty on a plastic sheet and propped it up against a wall. One blob is the Strange Attractor with its Neodymium Iron Boron (NdFeB) magnet beneath the putty. That initially combines its force with gravity to help pull the putty down.
The other putty is the heat sensitive Twilight Thinking Putty. This video doesn't really demonstrate its color changing capability.
To add some visual interest I made a turtle impression on each blob of putty. Watch those turtles slide!
The Strange Attractor putty is much stiffer than the Twilight so it doesn't flow down the sheet of plastic very fast. But it has the magnet pulling it down. Who do you think wins the race?
This is two hours and 40 minutes of putty action. I took a picture every 24 seconds and play them back at 24 frames per second.
A long time ago I got some of Crazy Aaron's Strange Attractor Thinking Putty for a time-lapse subject. I finally got around to using it in its own movie!
My movie is in two segments. I started each segment with the shots taken each second and gradually increased the intervals to 10 seconds. The first segment shows 30 minutes. The second shows 47 minutes. I play them back at 15 frames per second. After a while the action slows even in the time-lapse video so I sped up the ends of each segment another eight times. That makes the action of the final bits of the segments 1200 times faster than real time. Whew!
I've got more magnets. I think you'll be seeing more of Crazy Aaron.
I've shown pictures of cactus blossoms at What's Up, Chuck? and described how they open in the evening and collapse the next day. Such a rapid change (but still over the course of a day) is an obvious subject for a time-lapse video.
Last Sunday evening gave me the opportunity to record the opening of one of the cactus blossoms.
I set up the camera and set my intervalometer to take a picture every two minutes. I set my LED desk lamp on a paver next to the camera to light up the cactus while the sun was below the horizon.
I started taking the pictures for the video at 6:36pm and let it go until 6:52 the next morning. I didn't get much sleep that night. I fretted about my camera sitting unattended in the back yard with a light shining near it. I shouldn't have worried so much. There was a lot between the light and the street so passers-by wouldn't have noticed anything.
Here's the first frame of the video. The flower is already opening. And there's a second flower about to open. Could they open together?
The cactus is lying on the ground. We had a wet winter and apparently the plants stored a lot of water and became top heavy. Many of the cactuses got so heavy their tops broke off. That's OK since cactus pieces simply take root and several new plants grow from each of the fallen parts.
The video starts while the sun is up. The lighting changes as the sun passes behind trees and clouds. When it sets, the desk lamp lights the scene with sharp, uniform lighting. The sun rises and the sharp shadows go away.
The second bud didn't open.
I raced home that evening to record the flower's end. Unfortunately, the collapse was well underway by the time I got home. And the neighboring bud was opening.
I had marked where the legs of the tripod were the night before and set the camera back where it was. I started the camera back up. I wanted to get a good night's sleep so I took the camera into the house when I went to bed.
I made my video by just letting the first segment play till I shut off the camera in the morning then continue with the second evening's segment with no transition. The second evening's action was in full swing and I didn't want to lose any action in a dissolve or fade. There is a major discontinuity but you'll get over it.
My video shows the first blossom opening from 6:36pm one evening until 6:52am the following morning. It then picks up (with the jump...I didn't get the camera exactly repositioned) at 5:19pm that evening and finishes at 10:57pm that night.
The shots were taken at two-minute intervals and play back at 15 frames per second. That works out to an hour going by every two seconds. Remember you can watch in full screen and in HD.
There are more flower buds developing. I'm going to try to record the opening and closing of a flower in one take. I'll take a day of vacation or work from home if I need to.
Sequels usually aren't as interesting as the originals. These videos probably continue that trend. I think they're fun to watch but my video of incoming flights just seems to have more pizzazz.
After we wrapped up the incoming flights sequence we went back to the hotel. Our room was on the 14th floor of the Airport Hilton. Our window faced the eastern ends of the south runways.
I put the camera as close to the window as the tripod would let it get and pulled the blackout curtain around it. I fired up the camera and watched the activity for a while. You can see a bit of reflection from the lights in the room on the left side of the video for a while. The camera snapped away for a while after the lights went out. Some time later I woke up, turned off the camera and closed the blackout curtain all the way so the morning sun wouldn't wake us.
This nighttime video of the airport shows the activity from 10:50pm until 12:15am. The planes are usually hard to make out. You see mostly their lights lighting their way. Watching in HD and in full screen probably will help.
This was shot at a rate of a frame every six seconds and played back at 15 frames per second. You see a minute and a half each second.
I started the camera again in the morning. We watched the planes a bit then went off for breakfast. The camera kept snapping away while we ate.
This time you get to see planes. This shows you Saturday morning's traffic from 7:15 till 9:20. I was hoping for fun cloud action but there is only a little churning on the right side.
It's fun to watch planes. I hope you had some fun, too.
We took last week off from work and checked out sights and shopping venues around Southern California. One of our trips included an overnight stay in Los Angeles.
Back in 1976 I took a semester off from school and took a job with Rockwell International ("Where Science Gets Down to Business"). An alumnus from New Mexico Tech was working there and told the head of the Computer Science department they wanted to hire an intern. They recommended me and I was happy to take a break from school.
I had no idea what the job was until I got there. It was in a department that did programming for the B-1 Bomber. I didn't make any real contributions to the program so I'm not really a baby killer. I was just a gofer. But that's what interns often are. I went back in June, 1977, for a second stint but got laid off the day after Jimmy Carter canceled the bomber's development.
Rockwell's plant was on the southeast corner of the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). They had bleachers set up at the north edge of the property for us to sit on and watch the activity of the airport. As you can see from my map I lived and worked very near the airport activity. As if that weren't enough I would watch the planes from other spots around the airport.
The constant stream of planes coming and going at this airport has been calling me to make time-lapse videos. Since we were spending the night in the area I finally had the opportunity.
I set up the camera at one of my old plane watching spots (shown in my map to the south of the airport). That location gives you a good view of the planes as they line up to land. You can see their approach especially well in the evening with their landing lights shining out from the darkness. I filmed the activity from 8:30pm until 10:00pm. I shot this at six-second intervals and play them back at 15 frames per second. The hour and a half flies by in just a minute.
There are two streams of planes coming in. One lands on the southernmost runway and the other lands on a northern runway. The departing planes leave mostly from the other two runways. We can't see much of the departing flights in this video. There are occasional flashes of their lights at the left edge but they come and go in only one frame so there's no motion.
The movie starts while the sky is still blue then goes gray. For your comfort and convenience, here's the first frame of the movie in its full technicolor glory.
Planes are magical. Too bad the terrorists have won and flying is a pain in the butt.
It's been a while since I mentioned any new gadgets in What's Up, Chuck? That used to be one of its main features. We seem to have most of the gadgets we need.
Until recently we used only Rocky and Silvia for our coffee making. We have a French press but it doesn't get used much.
We got a new gadget. We now have a Bodum Santos vacuum coffee maker. We use it on weekend mornings when we have more time to brew and drink our coffees. It takes about 20 minutes to brew our coffee in it. Somehow, this brewer seems to extract a lot more caffeine than Silvia does. We both get rather buzzed from this coffee.
Jerry suggested that we have some vacuum brewed coffee this evening. As I was getting ready to make the coffee it occurred to me that this was a time-lapse movie opportunity.
I thought that there might be a problem. Usually, after all the water is in the upper chamber I take the pot off of the burner. There's a lot of residual heat in the stove's grate and I thought that it might keep the lower chamber from cooling and sucking the coffee back down quickly enough. There was going to be no way to move the pot off the burner in a way that could be followed smoothly by the camera. I set a fan to blow across the stovetop after I turned the flame off. I figured that the moving air and the heat diffuser would keep the heat in the grate from keeping the pot hot too long. Apparently that worked. After I gave the grounds a stir I turned off the heat and the coffee quickly got drawn down to the lower pot.
Here we see the brewing of coffee in the vacuum coffee maker. It took around 19 minutes. I shot one picture per second and play them back at 24 frames per second.
Damn good coffee!
Bubbles stay on the surface of the grounds after all the water is drawn back to the lower pot. After a long time there will still be bubbles there if I leave the lid on the top. Here's a picture of the grounds after we've enjoyed our coffee. You'll notice that there are still a few bubbles that haven't burst.
Here's one that isn't really worth watching. Unless you want a glimpse of my gams.
I wanted to see if taking pictures of me running and walking on the treadmill at regular intervals and playing them back in a movie would do fun things like making wagon wheels spin backwards in old Westerns.
There are moments of appearing to be walking backward on the belt (but no wagon wheels!) but mostly we get to see me bounce up and down and the treadmill change its incline.
I did two of the treadmill's programmed exercises. First, I did the "Walk in the Park." It runs at a constant rate and increases and decreases the deck's incline. There are seven minutes of that exercise going at 4.5 mph. Then I did the "Interval 1-1" program. That has you go at one pace and inclination for a minute then at another pace and inclination for another minute. Repeat. I alternate between 4.5 and 7.5 mph.
This was shot at a frame each second and played back at 15 frames per second. A minute flies by every four seconds.
Today was another vacation burning day. It was a chore day.
Our yard is lined with oleanders along the front and one side. The oleanders are dying. I thought that cockroaches and oleanders were going to be the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. But the oleanders aren't going to be so lucky. They're dying of Oleander Leaf Scorch (read all about it).
Here's a picture of an oleander that's still on the side of the yard.
That is what oleanders are supposed to look like. (Actually, there are a couple of leaf tips at the top left corner that are showing the scorching.)
Here's one still at the end of the driveway.
Dying.
There is no cure. There is no vaccine. They're going to die.
Instead of waiting until they're dead then starting a new screen to block the view of the highway we decided that now's the time for them to go.
Today I took down the last clump of the oleanders that went across the front of our yard.
Of course (since this blog is all time-lapse all the time) I made a time-lapse video of the process.
I set the intervalometer to have the camera take a shot every three seconds. I play them back in my video at a rate of 30 frames per second. That speeds the action by 90 times. It took a little more than an hour and a half and the video is over in just over a minute (including a four-second title).
After I took the camera in the house I continued to hack at the stumps. There is no way to get them out of there without some heavy duty power equipment. As I was hacking away a car stopped and the driver got out and came over. He's in the tree trimming business and can grind the stumps out. He's a neighbor. I think we'll hire somebody to do that. Maybe him.
This really isn't a terribly interesting movie. If you skip it I won't be upset.
I finally did what I've wanted to do ever since I got my time-lapse movie gadget.
I spent a nice, warm, Spring day at the San Diego Zoo watching the Galápagos Tortoises while the camera snapped picture after picture.
The Zoo has two recently renovated enclosures for their herds of turtles tortoises. The males and females are segregated. As you know from your reading about Galápagos Tortoises, the various islands of the archipelago host different subspecies of tortoises and they don't want hybrids. So they put males and females of the same subspecies together when the time is right. In the meantime they're kept apart so accidents don't happen.
I got to the Zoo just when they opened and headed straight for the tortoises. I set the camera up at the females' enclosure. The gals were spread around their enclosure. The guys were all clumped up at the near wall so I figured they might not show up well. I set the camera to take a shot every four seconds.
After 50 minutes of filming the females I had to take a break. Nature was calling and I had to answer. They had kind of settled down so it seemed a good time to switch enclosures anyway.
After my brief break I set the camera up at the corner of the males' enclosure. I kept shooting every four seconds. They're in a rather large enclosure and I was using my fisheye lens so I was worried that the tortoises in the distance would be mere dots. It turns out that they show up pretty well wherever they are in the enclosure, at least when they're moving. And move they do. Sped up by in the video they are absolutely hyperactive. But inert at times. At one point they all took a siesta. I thought I was I was not going to get any more action. But after their little naps they perked up and romped around the enclosure again.
The frames of this video were shot every four seconds (15 frames each minute) and played back at 15 frames per second. That speeds the action by a factor of 60.
I made some pizzas using crusts I made using Martha Stewart's recipe from Everyday Food. I topped them with mozzarella cheese, tomato slices and basil. I used too much cheese and when the crusts rose and the cheese melted everything slid off the crust onto the pan. Charred cheese is a treat so it wasn't a disaster.
It looked like a time-lapse movie subject.
So I made pizzas again and used too much cheese so it would all slide off the crust. I put the convection oven on the counter and set up the camera and recorded the cheeseslide.
The sun was coming in through the kitchen window and lighting everything up. The reflections on the door of the oven make things kind of hard to see well. You get to see me reflected in the door now and then.
So I did it again some time later. This time I waited till the sun wasn't going to light things up and I hung a dark towel in the area the oven's door was going to be reflecting. We can see into the oven a bit better this time. I baked two pizzas this time. Mine is on top with the bonus cheese. Jerry's is on the bottom with enough cheese for the pizza without making a mess.
The mess is what all this was about.
I had the camera snap away at one frame per second and I play them back at 24 frames per second. We see the pizzas bake in less than 45 seconds.
Here's another view of my commute. I wanted to see what my drive to work looks like sped up.
Every morning I get to wait in a line of cars that are mostly moms taking their kids to an elementary school and a middle school that are next door to each other. There are lots of cars and only one lane for most of the time. Traffic backs up. I like the cloud action when stopped. And the clouds swinging around as the road bends are fun, too.
Since I had the equipment set up, I recorded the return trip and made a movie of my round trip. The drive home had some more sitting and waiting after I got off the freeway. The evening commute didn't have as much light so the exposures were longer and have dramatic blurring (that's more visible in the stills). This probably makes the action look smoother. No clouds on the way home.
I took pictures at a rate of one per second and played them back at 15 frames per second.
I'm burning a vacation day. I'm getting over a cold. When I do those things at the same time I just hang around the house and relax.
What's more relaxing than the sound of a camera's shutter clicking at regular intervals?
Nothing.
I made a couple of videos of my Lava Lite. (Well, the Lava Lite company now seems to call their product "Lava Lamp." I guess they decided if you can't beat them, join them.)
The first one was shot in the living room with a towel as its backdrop. It shows what a Lava Lite Lamp goes through in the hour and 45 minutes after it is turned on. I put my little clock next to it so you can see how long things are taking.
I shot it at a rate of one picture every three seconds. There are looooooong stretches of time where nothing really is happening (other than the clock spinning). So I have played back the static periods at 60 frames per second to get things moving. Where there is actual activity I play it at 15 frames per second.
The initial sploosh of the lava takes only five frames so there was no point in trying to slow that down. The lava just appears. When we're speeding up action, any action that starts out fast goes by in the blink of an eye. Sorry.
While I was recording the warm-up video, I watched other folks' YouTube time-lapse videos of Lava Lamps. I plagiarized a couple of their ideas and made a second video.
I hauled the Lava Lamp to the bedroom and put it on the dressing chest in front of the mirror. I lowered the black-out shade and fired things back up. The lamp had cooled down so it starts out with no action. I closed the door to keep the room as dark as possible (but the sun came out from the clouds and lights up the background). After a couple of hours I went back to check on things. There was no noise coming from the bedroom. The battery had died after a little more than an hour and a half.
Well, the single charge was used to capture last week's tide and all this lava action. I should have thought about the battery but I didn't. It's pretty impressive that a single charge of the battery can take more than 6200 shots that went into these movies.
Here is the Lava Lamp in the dark in front of the mirror. This one was shot one frame per second and played back at 24 frames per second.
And just because I can, here's an animated GIF of the frames where the lava makes its first out-of-the-body experience. You have to click on this thumbnail to see it in action.
Yesterday, we experienced a "King tide" here on the west coast. This is a very high tide followed by a rather low tide. (The east coast probably had theirs as well but I wasn't there.) I had a vacation day I needed to use. The weather forecast said that rain was going to move in late Friday afternoon. Low tide was going to happen in mid-afternoon so chances were good that I could record the full range of this extreme tide.
I got up at my usual time and had a breakfast of a toasted bagel. I didn't have my usual bowl of cereal and mug of orange juice and I skipped my morning shots of espresso. There were going to be six and a half hours between high tide and low tide and there was going to be no opportunity to step away from the camera to answer the call of nature. I had to avoid liquids!
I packed up my camera and intervalometer. I got a train ticket and headed over to the same spot I recorded my previous beach scene.
I got everything set up. The camera was pointing in the same direction as before with my wonderful new fisheye lens. I set up the intervalometer, plugged it into the camera and turned it on. Nothing.
Its batteries had run out.
But I was prepared! I had spares with me and installed them and fired up the intervalometer. Pictures started being taken!
I set up the camera in aperture priority mode. I didn't want to use fully automatic mode since that might change the aperture setting and change the depth of field. That really isn't much of an issue with a fisheye lens since its depth of field is very deep even with a wide aperture. I wanted the camera to adjust to changes in light level with the thinning and thickening of the clouds. I hadn't anticipated the complete clearing of the clouds.
When the clouds cleared, I was afraid that the exposure would be set too low when the sun was in the frame so I changed the exposure to manual and used the exposure setting the last automatic exposure. That way there was no abrupt change in the exposure and it wouldn't change as the sun made its appearance.
But then thick clouds moved back in and I realized that the exposure was now much too low and I changed back to the automatic aperture priority setting. At that point there is an abrupt change and things go from too dark to just right.
I seem to have accomplished all these tweaks to the exposure settings without moving the camera!
Then it got very cold and windy and the rain moved in. I had to quit. The last few frames of the video have water drops showing.
Low tide was 45 minutes after I closed up shop. It was going to drop less than another foot. I captured more than six and a half feet of the falling tide.
I started taking pictures at 8:16am, Friday, February 18, 2011. High tide was at 8:54 at 6.45 feet. I quit at 2:25pm. Low tide was at 3:25pm at -1.18 feet.
This is the graph of the tide level for the day. The "+" is when I grabbed the image.
What we have here are images taken at 12 second intervals. They're played back at 30 frames per second. Every second of the video is six minutes of real time.
Remember, this is in HD but I don't embed it as HD since that doesn't fit in the window as laid out by Blogger. Besides, some people have DSL and you know that sort of connection takes forever to load YouTube videos in low res. So I leave it up to you to select HD if you want to see it in its greatest glory. Well, the greatest YouTube offers. The original on my Mac is much, much nicer!
I don't know why the music doesn't play for me unless it's in full screen mode. I wonder if it plays for you.
When I got home I wasn't desperate to use the bathroom. If the weather had held out I would have been able to hold out myself!
I spent an hour and a half at the Oceanside pier yesterday and made a little time-lapse video of the pier, the sand, the water and the sky. I used my new 10.5mm fisheye lens to capture the action. The only problem with this is that everything becomes much smaller than they normally appear.
Another minor problem with this is that the video took in a lot of action that is hard to see all at once.
There are the people going up and down the pier. There's really not much you get to see there...just people moving back and forth.
The clouds turned out pretty well. The fisheye lens captured their movement across a very wide field and it kind of makes them look like they're swirling around the center of the view. That's fun.
The waves turned out OK. With six seconds between shots there isn't a lot of continuity there.
There aren't a lot of people on the beach. It was cool, cloudy and windy. There are joggers. There are a couple of people poking around the rocks at the lower right and around the pier's legs. I think they were harvesting mussels or something. And there's an occasional child who has to dig in the sand.
About halfway through, a couple with their baby park their stroller in the middle of the view and stay there till the end of the video. I kept hoping they'd leave because I thought I had taken enough pictures to get a idea of what this sort of scene would look like. But I didn't want to just cut it off while they were still a prominent feature of the scene. They were taking turns with a skimboard. The father never got it to glide. Once he stepped on it it would dig into the sand and stop. The mother had a little better luck. Kind of. She'd glide a little way then fall into the water. At least she got the board to do some gliding with her on it.
They finally packed up and left. Once they got out of sight I stopped and packed up. It was cold and windy and I had had enough.
I wanted to use the same exposure for all of the shots. Since the camera was going to point toward the sun and the clouds would hide and expose the sun, I didn't wan to use any of the automatic settings. That would make the pictures get dark when the sun was exposed and it would get too light when the sun went behind thick clouds. So I took a shot in an automatic mode with the camera pointing away from the sun and used the exposure it ended up with for the video.
Here is the video made from 1/800th second exposures at f/14. The shots were taken every six seconds from 10:40 till 12:06. They're played at a rate of 10 frames per second. That lets you see each minute of real time pass each second.
I'm looking forward to doing this when the weather is nice and with an extreme tide. Crowds and rising water will be a good combination.
I got a new piece of photographic equipment: a 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye lens! Super-duper wide angle...180° view from corner to corner! It's not a zoom lens. Nikon makes a 10-24mm zoom but I wanted the faster lens for nighttime movie-making. And one of the lenses that came with the camera includes half of that range anyway.
Since it has such a wide view I thought it would be a good lens for shooting the sky. It can see a lot of the sky and can include much of the ground at the same time! So last night I put it to work.
Jerry and I went to my usual astronomy viewpoint and shot the rising of the just-past-full moon. We got set up and started shooting at 7:15. The moon made its first appearance at 7:40. It had risen a couple of minutes before that but had to rise above a bit of a hill.
I had set the exposure to get nice images of the stars against the mostly black sky. I hadn't taken pictures of the sky with a full moon so I didn't know if that exposure would be completely washed out or look nice. I couldn't tell while while pictures were being taken...I had turned off the image review to save the battery for picture taking. So after an hour and a half I decided that this was just an experiment and quit. If the moonlit portion was overexposed I didn't want to be depressed after sitting around for any longer.
It turns out that the exposure for the dark sky was great for the moonlit scene. There are still stars visible and the ground is nicely lit.
One of these days I'm going to make an all-night movie.
I shot 16 seconds long exposures with the ISO sensitivity set to 3200 and used the lens's widest aperture. There is one second between exposures.
Your videographer makes an occasional appearance. The spot is a popular place for skywatching and probably lovers' laning. So every now and then a car comes by and I stand next to the camera to keep the headlights from shining on the camera and making lens flares. But this is a wide angle lens so I got in the picture when that happened. And at times you can see Jerry or me wandering down the road.
Here's a full-sized picture I took before shooting the movie. The town on the horizon on the left is Borrego Springs. The lights in the bottom left corner are cars on Banner Grade and San Felipe Road. That part of the scene is fun to watch in the video. Of course, Orion is prominent up there in the sky.
I kept saying "I wish I were home in Kansas!" "I wish I would see meteors!" I got my wish. Once. It's on the right side of this picture below Orion.
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